The Kaunas Biennial is the principal contemporary art biennale of Lithuania and, by its own continuing institutional argument and the assessment of the Biennial Foundation in the Netherlands, the largest and longest-running international contemporary art festival in the Baltic states. It opened in 1997 in Kaunas — Lithuania's second city, the interwar provisional capital between the two Lithuanian republics, and the country's principal cultural counterweight to Vilnius — as the Kaunas Textile Biennial, an exhibition framed around the textile-art tradition that had been cultivated through the late-Soviet decades at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and that had remained, across the long Soviet occupation, one of the few mediums in which Lithuanian artists could work with relatively wide expressive latitude under the official applied-art classification. The first edition, Textile Tradition and the Present Day, opened in autumn 1997; the second edition, The Line, in 1999.
The institutional transition from textile-specific exhibition to general contemporary biennale was announced in 2007, when the word textile was removed from the title and the programme was reframed around the broader range of contemporary practice — video, performance, contemporary dance, sound, social and discursive projects — while retaining textile as one continuing strand of curatorial concern. By the 10th edition in 2015 — Threads: A Fantasmagoria about Distance, curated by the French critic Nicolas Bourriaud — the institution was operating as a fully international contemporary biennale, although the textile etymology remained legible in the curatorial title itself. By the 14th edition in 2023, when the biennial twinned with the Survival Kit festival in Riga to mount the joint exhibition Long-distance Friendships under co-curators Alicia Knock and Inga Lāce, the Kaunas programme was operating as one of the principal continuing pan-Baltic and continental European contemporary art platforms.
An edition built around the question of exhaustion
The 15th edition, Life After Life, opened on 12 September 2025 and ran through 23 November. Adomas Narkevičius — Lithuanian, born and trained in Lithuania, with curatorial appointments at the Vilnius-based Rupert Centre for Art (until 2019) and subsequently at Cell Project Space in east London — was announced as sole curator in 2024 by then-director Viktorija Šiaulytė, who described his anticipated programme as "irreverent, experimental and porous to other disciplines." The edition's thesis is that the inherited biennial form — as a recurring international survey premised on the legibility of the world to the contemporary visual exhibition — has reached an impasse with the present, and that the biennial's continuing value depends on its willingness to function as a malleable form, to suspend rather than reaffirm the social and aesthetic fluencies of contemporary art, and to take exhaustion, transition and the unresolved as its working ground rather than its background condition.
The edition's principal venues — the Historic Stumbras Factory on K. Būgos g. 7 (a former state distillery and a continuing landmark of Kaunas's late-Soviet industrial inheritance), the Kaunas Artists' House on V. Putvinskio g. 56, and the Temporary M. K. Čiurlionis Art Gallery on Mackevičiaus g. 27 (operated by the Faculty of Arts and Education of Kaunas College) — were chosen to extend the editorial argument into the urban fabric of Kaunas itself. The Meno Parkas Gallery on Rotušės Square and the Kaunas City Museum were programmed as accompanying venues; the satellite exhibition, organised in collaboration with the Biennale Gherdëina in the Italian Dolomites, extended the programme outward into a wider European institutional network. The edition gathered more than thirty artists from across Europe, the Americas and Asia and was reviewed in the international press — including Burlington Contemporary — as one of the institutionally most distinctive Baltic contemporary editions of the year.
